The Name of the Rose

Review by Garnet Brooks

This film is an adaptation of Umberto Eco's book of the same name. Its stars are Sean Connery as Brother William and Christian Slater as his aid Adso. F. Murray Abraham is a representative of the Inquisition sent to extract information. The director is Jean-Jacques Annaud.

The film is set in the middle ages. Brother William and Adso are traveling to a Benedictine monastery. The two are themselves Franciscans. Brother William is a learned man versed in classical knowledge but he also has qualities of both a detective and a scientist. He carries with him scientific instruments like his astrolabe which are concrete representations of his way of thinking.

When they are greeted and made at home in the monastery they also learn that one of its brothers has apparently committed suicide. The man Adelmo was an illustrator of manuscripts. The man is believed to have jumped from a tower window. Brother William is not so sure. He and Adso investigate the death and quickly come to the conclusion that there are hidden motives and that someone might have killed the illustrator. Others begin to die. Venantius, a translator, and Berengar, a library assistant also meet gruesome deaths. Brother William follows clues but others in the monastery believe the devil is at work. The blind librarian Jorge de Burgos admonishes the monks one day for laughing. Brother William comes to believe that a book about humor is at the core of the mystery. The men who die all have black stains on their hands and tongues. It is as if they had touched a poisoned book but Brother William does not know which one. The library itself is off limits. Brother William comes to believe that the book is a lost volume written by Aristotle.

A new terror arrives at the monastery. Bernardo Gui a representative of the Inquisition arrives and intensifies the already existing conflicts among the brothers. He heightens their fears and identifies a helpless peasant girl as a participant in a satanic ritual. She and two others are questioned and tortured. The girl whose name is never known in the film is the woman that Adso has begun to love. The girl is the nameless rose of the title. Adso asks William to save the girl. Brother William is extremely reluctant to do so because he has encountered Gui before. In that encounter William barely escaped with his life. To disagree with an inquisitor is heresy in itself. William tries to help and is again in danger. But it is too late for the three accused are taken to be burned at the stake.

The final third of the movie is full of drama. The fate of the three accused of heresy, the fates of William and Adso, and the well being of everyone in the abbey is in the balance. A force to counter the inquisitor comes from an unlikely source.

This is a mystery but a very atypical one. The medieval setting is rendered in such detail by the filmmakers that it seems to come alive. The settings are in choir, cloister, vaults, crypts, and catacombs. This heightens the sense of mystery and otherworldliness. Grand historical conflicts are captured here too. The action takes place at a time when the struggle to destroy heretical beliefs was intense. They were in the process of eliminating divergent religious views. Contained also in the matrix are discussions of church doctrine and matters of philosophy which might be thought too theoretical to incorporate into a film. The issues translate nicely though and do not seem overly abstract or out of place. They also do not slow down the action of the plot. The film manages to be quite suspenseful despite debates about whether or not Jesus owned the clothes he wore.

The mystery genre can be quite formulaic. When you've seen one footprint you've seen them all. Yet this film manages to make finding footprints fresh again. Some of these issues are addressed in the audio commentary by director Annaud and in the German documentary included in the DVD. Annaud says that he thinks the book's author Eco believes that there is little new and that the art in making something is stringing the old ideas together in a fresh way. The film certainly does this. Even its look is novel. Instead of the regulation Hollywood faces this film is populated with people who have memorable looks. Some of them might have emerged from a Rembrandt painting. The commentary is a good one and there is also footage of an interview with Eco who talks about his book but does not speak much of the literary theory behind it. Eco is a professor of semiotics. The meaning associated with the nameless rose is not overtly apparent. Rather it is complex, ephemeral and thus it exists in the mind of the reader as a presence in a way it could not if it were explicated stared. The rose haunts Adso the rest of his life. And so she haunts us too.